Could a universal flu vaccine be near?

A new universal flu vaccine could be on the horizon, according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

Influenza still kills hundreds of thousands people a year throughout the world, even when many people get annual vaccines meant to protect patients against the most common strain that season. But all kinds of circumstances could prevent people from getting the proper vaccine to protect them in any one year. For example, scientists could miscalculate the most dangerous or common flu strain in a season or a person who normally gets a flu vaccine forgets or is unable to get it the next year when the most virulent strain is particularly strong.

But a vaccine that would offer broad protection against all or most types of influenza could offer a longer-term and more error-proof coverage. According to the study, the potential for finding a broader vaccine comes with the ability to use antibodies to block a portion of the virus seen in all influenza A varieties.

According to the researchers, it is possible to “boost” the existence of such broadly neutralizing antibodies in humans that would fight against a wide variety of flus through exposure to hemagglutinin (HA) stalk domain of influenza A viruses. Essentially, the antibodies were learn to recognize and attack the part of the flu virus that stays the same even as the specific strains ebb and flow each year.  

Researcher Matthew Miller told Science Daily what the new study brought to their understanding of a “universal vaccine.”

"Our findings show that just having antibodies isn't enough. You have to have antibodies that bind to very specific places on the virus. Now that we know the places where antibodies have to bind, we can modify our vaccines so that we generate those antibodies in higher numbers,” he said.

These antibodies would also conscript the body’s white blood cells into the fight, upping the immune system’s anti-flu fighting power.

The researchers pointed out that specific antibodies were more important in previous flu vaccines than they even knew, meaning they would continue to be important even in universal vaccines. The study authors called for more research to fully understand how such universal vaccines could work and to find out if similar principles could be applied to fighting other diseases such as HIV and cancer.